Bloodsport Revisited

October 20, 2010

It had been a long time since I last watched the late 80s martial arts classic Bloodsport, the film that launched the career of Jean-Claude Van Damme. My Korean cable channels very often throw out brilliant 80s action flicks like Predator, Commando, First Blood and 70s martial arts masterpieces like Enter the Dragon and Drunken Master but unfortunately, they don’t have a great deal of variety and tend to repeat the same half dozen over and over again. Recently, it occurred to me that Bloodsport seemed like perhaps the most fitting film that my Korean cable hadn’t yet broadcast (to my knowledge). This in turn triggered a nostalgic longing in me and, lo, I got my hands on the fight flick forthwith. I suggested to my wife that she watch it with me but she firmly declined and politely informed me to watch it alone. At least, that is how she euphemistically remembers the moment that she rebuked my suggestion with a swift “fuck off”.

Released in 1988 and directed by one Newt Arnold, Bloodsport was made for a mere $1.5 million and became a surprise box-office success, grossing $12 million in the domestic U.S. market alone. Van Damme had been in Hollywood for a few years by then, eking out a living doing stunt work and extra work, but Bloodsport marked his first starring vehicle. The film was written by martial arts practitioner and fight choreographer, Frank Dux, and purports to be based on the true events of his life participating in underground fight tournaments. Twenty-two years later, and on account of the inexhaustible capacity for nostalgia amongst our shameless generation, it remains a cult classic much beloved by fans of the cheesy action films of yore.

Frank Dux is an army captain who goes AWOL in order to participate in The Kumite, a renowned underground martial arts tournament taking place in Hong Kong. By way of an extended flashback we discover that Frank had a difficult childhood on account of his unrelenting Frenchness and was one day apprehended by a Japanese martial arts master when he and his dickhead teen buddies hit upon the incredibly wise move of breaking into the master’s home to steal his sword. Rather than having his awfully French head cut off, Frank is given the opportunity to be trained in Master Tanaka’s exotic martial art in order to turn around his wayward ways and grow into a disciplined ass-kicker. Frank agrees and is soon having seven shades of shit kicked out of him by the master’s son, Shingo. Years later, Shingo dies in entirely unexplained circumstances and Frank implores Tanaka to teach him the family martial art properly in order for it to be kept alive and so that he may one day fulfil Shingo’s wish of representing the Tanaka clan in The Kumite. Tanaka agrees and proceeds to train Frank by beating his naked torso with a bamboo staff and stringing him up with an elaborate pulley system that forces Frank’s legs into a complete split. In mid-air. Tied between two small trees. Eventually, they move on to cooler stuff like Frank snatching goldfish from a pond with his bare hands whilst blindfolded, thus indicating that he has mastered the fighting style. Back in the now, Frank lands in Hong Kong and is pursued by Air Force cops looking to get him back to the states. He meets Ray Jackson, a hulking, wild-eyed freestyle fighter from the states who is also in Hong Kong for The Kumite and the two become friends. He also meets a sexy blonde reporter who is looking to break a story on The Kumite and, although she wants to jump on Frank’s dick badly, she’s nonetheless appalled by the human cockfighting glory he is in passionate pursuit of. Frank enters the tournament and excels, moving ever closer toward the final showdown with the reigning champ, Chong-Li. Chong-Li, however, has already stomped Frank’s friend Jackson and almost killed him. He’s a badass who enjoys exciting the crowd by needlessly crippling and even killing opponents and he’s prepared to cheat in order to remain champ. Will Frank be able to overcome his emotions and defeat Chong-Li using calm, Zen warrior power?

Feel the Van Dammage!

Bloodsport remains popular apparently on account of the different martial arts that are featured in the movie. It’s something of a proto-mixed martial arts showcase and plays like a decent adaptation of a video game despite not actually being based on a video game in the first place. Frank squares off against muay thai fighters, a sumo wrestler, karate masters, etc. There is even an African guy whose style consists solely of imitating a shrieking monkey that bounds around on all fours, slapping at his forehead and smacking the shit out of people’s skulls as if they were coconuts. This was back in the day when presumably such an awful spectacle wasn’t a problem. The premise is also very simple and stripped down. Frank Dux is just trying to win the fight tournament. Contrast that with, say, Enter the Dragon where the fight tournament is a mere Macguffin in order for Bruce Lee to infiltrate the fortress of a Chinese crime lord and bring down his empire of opium and sex trafficking whilst taking revenge for the death of his sister and the overall desecration of the Shaolin temple. There are no such distractions in Bloodsport, which went some way to convincing me as a child that it was actually quite a factual sports bio-pic. Van Damme displays some legitimately impressive skills with the debut of his trademark 360° jump-spin “helicopter” kick and the utterly marvellous full-splits uppercut to opponent’s ballsack move. It’s almost touching to see the man at arguably his most innocent, prior to being subsumed by his own eccentric reaction to celebrity and the adoption of a herculean cocaine habit. Unfortunately, the fight choreography is a little slow and hasn’t aged terribly well. It seems to suffer from poor editing and compares particularly unfavourably to the frenetic pace of Jackie Chan’s superior chop-socky flicks that were being made around the same time.

Van Damme has obvious limitations as a leading man but here he is brilliantly supported by the immensely charismatic and entertaining Donald Gibb as the nutty brawler Ray Jackson. Gibb’s sweaty, bear-like physique and wide-eyed, manic grin make for a truly fun character who delivers in terms of comic-relief. He has the best line in the film. When told “listen pal, stay out of this” by one of the military police (Forest Whitaker) come to apprehend Frank, he replies “I ‘aint yer pal, dickface.” Enter the Dragon veteran badass, Bolo Yeung, performs admirably as the psychotic chief antagonist Chong-Li. Yeung displays his signature move of jiggling his outrageous muscle-moobs whilst he crunches the skulls of his unfortunate opponents. It was only recently I noticed the Korean flag on Li’s headband and on the jacket of his coach in the movie despite the character sporting a more Chinese name. This is but one of many slightly odd features about Bloodsport that may be the responsibility of the writer, the “real” Frank Dux, who claims that the movie is based on true events in his life.

Full-splits to ballsack uppercut - Martial arts move of the decade!

Frank Dux really is a martial arts expert and instructor who has operated martial arts schools in Hollywood since the 1970s. He also really was in the military for a few months. Other than that, there isn’t a whole lot that can be verified about the man, especially his claims regarding his involvement in a actual underground fighting tournaments (also called ‘Kumite’, a name taken from Karate training) and various outlandish claims made about his clandestine exploits in the military. See this Los Angeles Times article from 1988 –Ninja: Hero or Master Fake? and for a more succinct take on the legend of Frank Dux I direct your attention to the inimitable Seanbaby, and his article 7 Fighters Who Lied Their Way to Legendary (Dux is #1)

Frank Dux was a spy and a master of Ninjitsu, which is just a Japanese word for somersaulting megaspy. He was the best. He trained under a shidoshi whose name was only coincidentally the name of a James Bond villain. He was in a covert branch of the military so secret that even our military didn’t know about him. He didn’t exist so hard that birds shit right through him. But someone did know about him: a shadowy society of martial artists who run a tournament called The Kumite. They invited Frank to enter, and that was their last mistake.

From 1975 to 1980, he was the undefeated Full Contact Kumite World Heavy Weight Champion. He had 56 consecutive knockouts in one tournament, a number too stupid to be fake. He set four world records in the same tournament including Fastest Recorded Kick with Knockout: 72 miles-per-hour. The Kumite Athletic Commission figured it was OK to keep radar guns pointed at the fighters at all times since Frank removed most of their gonads before the long term effects of radar exposure could manifest. In fact, Frank Dux punched so many dicks through their sacred walls that city temple inspectors shut them down for code violations.

Suspiciously, the organization that held the Kumite seemed to share a home address with Frank Dux, and the trophy they gave him was the same trophy that he suspiciously paid for himself. Think about that: The Kumite is so secret that the only paper trail leads to Frank Dux, professional secret agent. That means that the other fighters, while obviously not very good at fighting, are unbelievably good at being secret. Why, if Frank Dux hadn’t written a book about them and bought himself that trophy, I doubt I’d have even believed they existed.

Bloodsport remains one for the shamelessly nostalgic. It marks the beginning of the Van Damme phenomenon and plays out with harmless brevity and simplicity. It’s a cheesy and accomplished martial arts film that feels like the cinematic equivalent of an early video game; Street Fighter 1, if they ever adapted it to the screen. That said, it’s not as ridiculous as later martial arts films that are deliberately based on video games like the actual Street Fighter movie Van Damme made or the Mortal Kombat movies. Bloodsport is easily more watchable and fun than those films. Alas, it’s not the best martial arts film out there, even for the era in which it was made, but it does what it says on the tin and delivers bloody, bone-crunching action. It’s worth revisiting if you haven’t seen it in years.

You did a lot of follow up work on that Dux info, thanks. I had forgotten the postscript saying that the movie was based on real events until I watched it this most recent time, Dave. Of course, this time, I had Wikipedia power! So I checked briefly saw the claims were disputed and bailed. Glad to get the rest of the 411…

Meanwhile you really are a big fan of this one, Huh? 😀 Glad you at least acknowledged Van Dammes “Obvious Limitations” thats a polite way of putting it, although in fairness this was very early in his career.

It was the stretching and helicopter kicks that carry this flick to glory. Well, those and Donald Gibb!

Bloodsport came out in the UK when I was about 9 years old. I remember the poster for it in the front window of our local corner shop back when corner shops still stocked a limited stack of home videos for rental. As such, it was one of the first martial arts action movies I ever saw (if we discount The Karate Kid, which wasn’t nearly as badass).

It’s weird. As a kid I thought Van Damme was pretty cool. Then, when I was a cynical teenager I realized he was a rather silly figure and, goddamn, did I hate Timecop, but, only quite recently did I come to appreciate that he worked his ass off in his own way to get where he was. His physical abilities were not something you could just pick up after a few months of martial arts stunt choreography training a la Keanu in The Matrix. He must have put in serious training for a good long time.

Alas, cocaine is a helluva drug, as the saying goes, and I guess he Van Dammaged himself in the end.

I don’t know that he’s ever fallen too hard, however. I live in South Korea and I’ve seen a number of fairly recent Van Damme flicks broadcast on cable TV out here that I’d never even heard of. He wasn’t lighting up any box offices with those (probably never will again) but, as Dolph Lundgren said of his similar career trajectory into C-list action fare, “it beats working”.